Organizing Committee
Xinxin (Katie) Zhu, MD, PhD, FAMIA, FIAHSI, Lead Chair
Dr. Zhu brings multidisciplinary experience to her current role as the Inaugural Executive Director of the Yale Center for Biomedical Data Science. Besides her medical training and practice in anesthesiology, she also received her M.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University under the U.S. National Library of Medicine fellowship. Previously, Dr. Zhu served as the Program Director in the Bridge Center for the NIH Bridge2AI Consortium, the External Advisory Board member to the Center for Advanced Technology at Columbia University, physician scientist lead at IBM Watson Research Headquarters, Chief Medical Information Officer at Kforce Government Solutions, associate medical director at Pfizer, clinical project manager at Philips, and healthcare subject matter expert at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She is the author of many scientific publications, 13 granted patents, and co-editor for the Springer book “Personal Health Informatics” and Elsevier book “Digital Health.” Dr. Zhu served as the Co-Chair for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Global Health Informatics Working Group, VP of Membership for the Consumer and Pervasive Health Informatics Working Group, as well as Scientific Program and Women Leadership Committee members. She is the Chair for the International Medical Informatics Association’s Organizational and Social Issues in Healthcare Working Group. She was elected to the fellowship of AMIA, and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics.
Jan Nygaard-Jensen, PhD, Co-Chair
Dr. Jensen holds a PhD in Health Science from University of Copenhagen and a Master of Science in Biochemistry. After multiple years in the US as a graduate student and later holding a few Post Doc positions, Jensen joined the pharmaceutical industry as a leader of beta cell biology and pancreatic regeneration. Jensen then became the lead of large strategic initiatives as well as lead of experimental testing of an entire therapeutic portfolio. During this time, Jensen developed more and more interest in data science and computational biology, connecting data science with drug discovery. Jensen then became Deputy site head and strategic partner of a new research institute in Oxford, this time heading Computational Biology and Technologies. The focus was on data driven drug discovery as well as external partnerships with Academia and Biotech’s, which led to a great opportunity to Join Boehringer-Ingelheim as Global Head of Computational Biologists Digital Sciences in October 2019 with initiatives and research groups across the major research sites Vienna (Austria), Ridgefield (United States) and Biberach (Germany). The ambition is here to shape the future drug portfolio by acting on novel biological insights generated from the application of state-of-the-art in silico methods to human disease data.
James Cai, PhD, Co-Chair
Dr. James Cai is the VP, Head of Computational Biology and Digital Sciences at BI’s Ridgefield site in the US, and Global Head of Computational Biology in Immunology, Respiratory (I&R), Cancer Immunotherapy and Immunoregulation (CIIM), responsible for applying state-of-the-art computational approach and data-driven insights to our current and next-generation drug pipeline to eventually benefit patients with unmet medical needs. James has been an innovative leader in drug discovery and development for the past 20 years, passionate about creating value from complex data, advanced analytics, and collaboration. Before joining BI, Dr. James Cai was the head of Data Science at Roche Innovation Center New York since 2014, focusing on value creation using human disease data in Early Clinical Development and Translational Research. Prior to that, he spent more than a decade at the Roche Nutley site in NJ, then the US headquarter of Roche Pharma, leading various Bioinformatics and Data Science teams. As a champion of innovative technologies, he helped Roche in the development of many modern analytic capabilities in drug discovery and development, including the first large scale whole exome sequence analysis pipeline, the introduction of NLP and text analytics, and later Real-World Data (RWD), scRNA-seqanalysis, and AI/Deep Learning. James holds a Ph.D. in Molecular & Cell Biology from Cornell University and a Master’s degree in biomedical informatics from Columbia University.